Is Long Island Medium fake

Answer 1

It is probably a good policy to have doubts about the authenticity of anything in a television program created for entertainment. The burden of proof would be on her to us.

The James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) currently offers a prize of one million U.S. dollars to eligible applicants who can demonstrate a supernatural ability under agreed-upon scientific testing criteria. To this date no one has claimed the prize.

Don't believe what you want to believe...

Without prior knowledge of a person, a practiced cold reader can still quickly obtain a great deal of information about the subject by analyzing the person's body language, age, clothing or fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, race or ethnicity, level of education, manner of speech, place of origin, etc. Cold readers commonly employ high probability guesses about the subject, quickly picking up on signals from their subjects as to whether their guesses are in the right direction or not, and then emphasizing and reinforcing any chance connections the subjects acknowledge while quickly moving on from missed guesses. You can Google someone and learn a lot. They frequently use obituaries to describe the loved one.

You need only look inside yourself for the answers you seek. The show is scripted and edited. The only thing REAL about reality shows are that the people are playing themselves. Cold readings work because the person being read WANTS to make a connection.

"I sense that you are sometimes insecure, especially with people you don't know very well."

"You have a box of old unsorted photographs in your house."

"You had an accident when you were a child involving water."

"You're having problems with a friend or relative."

"Your father passed on due to problems in his chest or abdomen."

"I see a heart problem with a father-figure in your family, a father, a grandfather, an uncle, a cousin ... I'm definitively seeing chest pain here for a father-figure in your family."

"I see a woman that isn't a blood relative. Someone around when you were growing up, an aunt, a friend of your mother, a stepmother with blackness in the chest, lung cancer, Heart disease, Breast cancer..."

"I sense an older male figure in your life, who wants you to know whilst you may have had disagreements in your life, he still loved you."

If our loved ones are floating around us wishing to tell us stuff and can't until some crazy lady sees them....it doesn't seem like much of an afterlife. If you can talk to a spirit through a mass produced ouija board then that doesn't make much sense either. Considering the marvelous complexity of the universe, its clockwork perfection, its balances of this against that, matter, energy, gravitation, time, dimension - I believe that our existence must be more than that. That what we are goes beyond Euclidean or other practical measuring systems, and that our existence is part of a reality beyond what we understand now as reality.

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I am leaving the above answer intact because this is a matter of opinion.

Here are my credentials for judgement: I worked over 30 years in television, producing, editing and creating stuff that aired from coast to coast.

As an editor, I know that if I am putting together a show, I'm never going to show anything that would make a host look stupid. So if Theresa Caputo walks up to someone and says "I have a message from your father" and the person's father is still alive, in good health and Theresa's claim is utterly wrong, all of that material is going to "wind up on the cutting room floor," to use the classic film term. There is no way that any editor or producer will allow recorded video of Theresa to air that shows that she is dead wrong about something.

So you don't see any of her "misses" the only material that airs are her dead-on accurate "hits."

Additionally, she is out in public, walking up to people. And the situation looks completely real. But it is not!

Here's the scenario: As Theresa approaches a person, that person sees Theresa, at least two camera people, a sound person with a fish-pole microphone and a producer carrying a clipboard with a bunch of consent forms that the person will sign to allow the show to air their visage.

If you can imagine yourself in this kind of a situation, that is completely different from some random person walking up to you on their own and "cold-reading" you. Quite frankly, were someone to start reading most people in America, I would imagine that the person would probably get a knuckle sandwich from a lot of people. But nobody's going to throw a punch with a bunch of cameras all over the place and a sound-person shoving a microphone at them.

And, it is likely that the producer or a production assistant walked up to the person before Theresa approached and asked them to sign a consent form to be on television. And that, completely changes the situation making what may look like a cold read into a complete setup. "Act surprised when Ms. Caputo approches you, please…"

Now, I do not doubt for a minute that Ms. Caputo probably has an incredible talent. People travel from all over the US and, perhaps, the world to see her and get a personal, private reading. That is legitimate, useful and appropriate. And Ms. Caputo would never have generated a television show were she not a very talented Medium. That part may be totally non-fake.

But, if you look at the context created by a couple of cameras, a sound person, a producer and Theresa Caputo working her show, the situation is completely different from that that is portrayed on the show.